Commemorative Impulses in the 'Heart of America': Kansas City, the Great War, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy

Given the importance of Kansas City in post-WWI American commemorative discourse, the setting of Book One of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) is striking, yet remains underexamined. Approaching the novel’s Kansas City setting through a spatial lens, however, resituates the narrative within the nation’s memorial culture and reveals its antimemorial qualities. Ironically, An American Tragedy critiques postwar commemorative culture by eliding references to the war and its memorial aftermath and presenting instead a narrative set in Kansas City, the postwar commemorative center of the US. In this way, the novel indirectly meditates upon three topics that resounded in the mid-1920s: commemorative spaces, silences, and inequities. Indeed, the novel presents a tragic series of linked figures who ironically evoke real postwar experiences: a young man whose life is destroyed after his involvement in the taking of human lives, mothers mourning the losses of their children, and veterans whose postwar lives of hardship and violence fall far short of memorial ideals. In this article, we argue for the significance of Kansas City in Dreiser’s work, especially as it links his perhaps most enduring novel to US practices and patterns of World War I memory making.